a selection of history today book reviews for december

(Comments are those of History Today)

From Levantine glory to dystopian wreck Aleppo, Syria's second city after Damascus, is one of the oldest settlements on earth, where Abraham is supposed to have milked his flocks in the fortified citadel. Today much of the city is in ruins, fought over by Sunni, Shia, Alawi, Kurd and...

Smuggling: Seven Centuries of Contraband This pacy book is a whistle-stop tour of what the dust jacket calls our 'dark history', namely the ruthless pursuit of profit at the expense of the law through the traffic of people, goods and ideas. It is a story that stretches across time and...

Churchill and Ireland Winston Churchill had a long association with Ireland, from his infancy in Dublin in the 1870s to his second premiership in the 1950s. During his life he adopted various stances on Ireland's political relationship with Britain. As a young...

The Tale of the Axe Oxford is full of history, dating back to its settlement in Saxon times. Yet it is rarely associated with prehistory, especially the Neolithic period beginning just before 4000 BC. In the long hot summer of 1976, that picture changed, at least...

Elizabethan England and the Islamic World The Mediterranean world loomed large in English culture in the 16th century. What is made strikingly clear in Jerry Brotton's new book, This Orient Isle, is the extent to which the Muslim inhabitants of North Africa and the Middle East...

The Collective Memory of the Vietnam War The Vietnam War has long been represented through the 'authenticity' of the GI experience. Those who 'were there' and related their experiences of a chaotic, brutally violent war have served as a cultural conduit for the conflict in ways which...

Full Steam Ahead to the Modern World This is an engaging history of the capitalist world in the 1850s, which stitches together vivid stories of entrepreneurs and adventurers from the United States to New Zealand. ...

Albania's Executioner Unmasked Few leaders have published as much and eliminated more people than Enver Hoxha, Albania's dictator from 1944 to 1985. Hoxha published on a Churchillian scale: 7,000 pages in 13 volumes of memoirs. Simultaneously, during his rule, of Albania's...